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Carnaval à la Nouvelle-Orléans, Op 275

Introduction

Between 1872 and 1873, the French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas visited New Orleans, shortly before his final return to Paris. His main reason for visiting the city was to see his brother, a businessman who lived in the French quarter, the Vieux Carré. Edgar Degas was deeply impressed by the dominant créole culture of the city, with its heady mixture of glamour, elegance and low life, and one of his early dance-inspired masterpieces, on danse chez monsieur degas, depicting a party at his brother’s house in New Orleans, dates from this visit.

During his initial concert tour of the USA in 1922, Milhaud had encountered the authentic New Orleans jazz tradition in Harlem, and on his second tour a few years later with his new wife Madeleine, they encountered southern segregation at first hand, being denied entrance to a negro theatre because they were white. The Milhauds had been exiled in the USA since 1940, and in 1947 their seventeen-year-old son Daniel decided that painting was to be his vocation. Daniel had learned of the existence of the Degas painting in New Orleans and mentioned it to his father. This inspired Milhaud to unite the white French, Latin-American and negro jazz Louisiana traditions in a new suite for two pianos, carnaval à la nouvelle-orléans. (We have preserved the lower-case letters with which it was published.) The thematic material comes largely from Louisiana folk tunes and the titles of the four movements are self-explanatory. The first allies the Latin-American Mardi Gras with an underlying jazz inflection, while the second and fourth reflect the city’s French folk-heritage. The title of the third movement—in many ways the heart of the work—is that of the Degas painting. The score was written between March and April 1947 for the American two-piano team of Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, who introduced it the following July at Michigan State College and recorded it for American Columbia (now CBS/Sony) soon afterwards. Their recording led Milhaud to write another work for them, the Concertino d’Automne for two pianos and chamber orchestra, in 1951.

Recordings

'If you like two-piano music you'll love this disc. There is simply so much to enjoy. Piano discs as uninhibited and infectious as this are few and fa ...'A hugely entertaining new disc from Hyperion and a superb introduction to the work of a currently rather underrated composer' (BBC Record Review)» More